The very fine public servant, Russ Feingold, addressed this in October 2001, when he stood tall as the only US Senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act. Warning that its anti-democratic provisions would create a nation "where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications," Feingold rightly concluded: "That country wouldn't be America."
So here we are, having devolved from the founders' principled insistence on erecting the strongest palisades for the defense of the people's personal liberties -- to now having a secret government inside our borders and inside our lives. Even the code-names of NSA's array of electronic eyes are almost comically Orwellian: PRISM, Tempora, XKeyscore, and -- my favorite -- Boundless Informant.
Boundless indeed. But all this, for what? To make you and me safe from terrorists, the hierarchy chants in unison. Constantly pointing to 9/11, the spies and their political henchmen solemnly assert that, hypothetically, bulk surveillance of every American might have, possibly could have, maybe would have stopped that horrific plot. But the phone conversations that mattered in that case were those that did NOT happen -- the breakdown in communication between the CIA and the FBI, and between FBI headquarters and its local agents.
When the top brass of US SpyWorld did a dog-and-pony show for the House intelligence committee on June 18, they claimed that "dozens" of terrorist attacks had been prevented since 9/11 by NSA's SuperVac programs. Dozens? "More than 50," clarified NSA's director. But wait, how many of those were plots for terrorist attacks on our soil? "A little over 10," he mumbled. That's it? Years of scooping up ALL metadata on EVERY American to find only 10 plots?
Moreover, he was able to name only four of those 10, and none were serious threats to do major harm to Americans. In fact, one involved a bombing in India, one is a questionable case of $8,500 ostensibly sent to terrorists in Somalia, one was actually uncovered by regular police work, and the fourth was not a plot to attack the US, but to send funds abroad to Al Qaeda. For this we should shred our Bill of Rights?
We can heap plenty of blame for this on Bush-Cheney, but it has been brought to full force by Obama -- a constitutional lawyer who pledged in 2008 to reverse the PATRIOT Act's assault on our civil liberties. Yet he's doing the opposite, and incredibly, he's insisting that "the program currently is not being abused." Worse, he's become testy about all the questioning of him and NSA. "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said to a reporter on Sept. 13, then expressed exasperation that people don't have faith in the system: "And if people can't trust not only the executive branch, but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."
Well, yes sir, you do have some problems, BIG ones. Obama and the surveillance establishment are proposing a bit more "disclosure" to fix the agency's PR problem. But that's just warmed over B.S. We can't give him -- or Congress -- a pass on this. It's too big, too destructive of our values and self respect. NSA's domestic spy matrix and the PATRIOT Act itself confront us as a multi-eyed, hydra-headed, democracy-devouring monster. Forget disclosure -- the monster must be dismantled.
*This article edited by both Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer
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